Dual-level toxicity assessment of biodegradable pesticides to aquatic species

Abstract

The use of ecological models to assess the effects of pesticides on the structure and function of aquatic ecosystems is of growing interest. Of utmost concern is assessment of pesticides that have the potential to biodegrade into metabolites that are as toxic as the parent pesticide. In this work, a mathematical model to predict and evaluate the effect of two pesticides on the population of aquatic biospecies where both pesticides are bio-available in water and sediments with one of the pesticides capable of biodegrading into the other but not vice versa is formulated and analyzed. Conditions for nonlinear stability, instability and Hopf-bifurcation are obtained. The model undergoes a Hopf-bifurcation when the rate of discharge of pesticides crosses a critical value, so that the population of the aquatic species follows an oscillatory pattern. Four hypotheses involving the concentration of the pesticides and the population of the aquatic species where qualitatively investigated: the aquatic species will completely die out with time, the population of the aquatic biospecies will remain under certain conditions, the pesticide will continually remain in water and there will be a periodic variation in the population of the aquatic species over time. Results also indicate that the biodegradation potential of one of the pesticides had significant effect on the population dynamics of the aquatic species.